Word: ectoplasmically
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Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox), ghostbuster con-artist extraordinaire, has some kooky spirit friends and some naughty spirit enemies, most notably the Soul Collector himself. Also, there's lots of special effects--people passing through walls, ectoplasm accidents, anatomically unstable ghosts. People are dying, and Bannister, who is the only one who can see the ghosts and those marked for death, must find out why, with the help of special effects. He also has an Andie-MacDowell-lookalike friend, Lucy Lynskey (Trini Alvarado), and, enhanced by special effects, things quickly go awry. In addition, the possibility of the existence...
...sloppy. He has young Beaumont in 1960 use the current slang "get off on," meaning enjoy, and lets an elderly English professor say he will "loan" the hero a car (old pedants say "lend"). The climax has the brutish Stark absurdly trying to write another novel to keep his ectoplasm from sloughing away in rivulets of goo. Characterization is perfunctory, with an odd exception: Beaumont's eight- month-old twin babies are vividly and charmingly described. For King fans this may be the sort of thing that sustains the myth that "he writes so well...
...much the grasping fraud that the audience is stunned when she delivers the goods. Indeed, she is stunned herself: there are few funnier sights than Page striding across the stage in pursuit of a ghost whose presence she senses but cannot see, snuffling at the wraith's ectoplasm like a spaniel who just knows a squirrel is somewhere nearby...
...lexicon of Baconian imagery is famous. Its most familiar component is the screaming Pope, smearily rising from blackness like carnivorous ectoplasm, his throne indicated by a pair of gold finials, the whole enclosed in a sketchy cage -- homage to an original that Bacon firmly denies having ever seen, the Velasquez portrait of Innocent X in the Doria collection in Rome. There are the Crucifixion motifs, reflections of Grunewald and the Cimabue Crucifixion in Santa Croce that was partly destroyed by the 1966 Florence flood, whose sinuous and near boneless body Bacon once startlingly compared to "a worm crawling down...
...legacy of doubt had weakened the moral underpinnings of Victorian and American society. But it had merely replaced religious faith with another dogma: the authority of Science. New believers turned to evidence of the world beyond the senses, "proof given by mediums who could communicate with the dead, make ectoplasm appear in darkened chambers and order inanimate objects to move at will. Katherine and Margaretta Fox of Arcadia, N.Y., were the superstars of the new movement, adolescents who could engender a rapping sound that issued, they said, from the beyond...